After three years without any new JUnit version, a few weeks back on September 10th a new version of JUnit has been published: JUnit 5! While there were only minor upgrades to the popular testing library over the last couple of years, this was a big release that the JUnit team had been working on since summer 2015. I had been following the development from the start and since a completely reworked architecture and lots of new features were to be expected, last year I decided to create a presentation on the topic.
The first time I had people listening to me talking about it was at Socrates Day Linz in October 2016. A month later in November Software Engineering Camp was happening in Erlangen and again I gave my talk. For a long time I have been an eager meetup and conference attendee, these were my first steps as a speaker.
In February, I attended the Microxchg conference in Berlin and met up with my friend Benjamin, who was organizing the Softwerkskammer Jena meetup. I mentioned JUnit 5 and my presentation about it and he invited me to come to Jena. Little did I know that Benjamin, my colleague Jonas and a few other local techies were organizing to found a new Java User Group: JUG Thuringia! Before I knew I found myself as a speaker at their opening event. I had a great time there, however, and since it became clear that sometime in late summer the first offical version of JUnit 5 would become available, I decided to give it one more shot at JUG Nuremberg, our local Java Usergroup.
Last week that time arrived and after reworking my presentation to reflect the latest developments I was prepared to update the local community. My employer codecentric was sponsoring my talk by providing food and drinks and lots of people had registered for the meetup. JUG Nuremberg is a fairly cozy group of people, once you’ve been there two or three times you know who’s a regular. However, this year many new faces showed up and last week’s meetup was no different – lots of new people! We even were able to hold a raffle as JUG Nuremberg had a book sponsored by dpunkt verlag and a usb power-bank by my employer.
I had many nice conversations after my talk and I got the impression that everybody was really looking forward to getting their hands on JUnit 5. I won’t go into the contents of my talk here, but if you want to fly through my slides again you can find them here. There’s also a new blog post on the codecentric blog (in german) by my colleague Tobias.
With the first official release of JUnit 5 published it will probably be less of a hot topic to talk about from now on. You should still keep your eyes open as there are a few interesting features planned for the upcoming releases (I’m especially looking forward to Scenario tests).
With that said, I hope to see many of the new faces at one of our upcoming monthly meetups.